JUSTICE
Opinion: Chicago’s overpoliced neighborhoods will remain “occupied” until the city defunds CPD Simon Balto’s history of police in Black Chicago shows why CPD can’t be reformed BY BOBBY VANECKO
This piece is part of a series that explores the various perspectives around defunding the police.
T
he book Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power, published last year, details the history of the Chicago Police Department’s quasi-military occupation of the city’s Black communities from the race riots of 1919 through the present day. Author Simon Balto, an assistant professor of African American history at the University of Iowa, demonstrates that “there is not a time in Chicago’s history where the city was home to large percentages of [B]lack people, and in which they had a smoothly functioning relationship with the CPD.” While most histories of mass incarceration start around the “War on Drugs” or “War on Crime” eras, Balto shows that those years’ massive investments towards expanding and militarizing America’s police forces had such devastating effects precisely because the police had already gained decades of experience working as the hired enemies of Black people, in the words of James Baldwin. CPD was formally founded in 1853, at a time when local economic and political elites were eager to control the city’s growing population of immigrants who they believed to be unruly and immoral. As labor leaders and progressives organized for better working conditions and economic security throughout the mid-to-late nineteenth century, the police were a tool to suppress
these movements and keep people from questioning the socioeconomic and racial status quo—a function that the police continue to serve today, as we saw in the police violence during mass protests in response to the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and others. This is even acknowledged in the book by the police themselves—Balto quotes an interview with former CPD Superintendent Leroy Martin in which he said, “What police work does, all over the nation, is to try to protect the city’s economic interests… basically just trying to contain the problems that occur in a geographical area, trying to make sure that the parts of the city that work continue to work, and in those parts that don’t work trying to keep the level of violence down and under control.” Further, in the face of obscene white racial terrorism leading up to and including the 1919 race riots, Balto describes how “members of the CPD repeatedly proved themselves to be defenders of whiteness and the color line, rather than protectors of all life and livelihood.” Even though twice as many Black people were killed and injured during the riots (which were started by white people and enabled by police inaction), twice as many Black people were arrested and indicted. Throughout the years that followed, including Prohibition and the Depression, the CPD was rampant with corruption and abuse, criminalizing entire Black neighborhoods and subjecting them to indiscriminate arrests and brutality.
Throughout the middle part of the century, Chicago’s Black population grew from about 8.2 percent to 32.7 percent. At the same time, from 1945 to 1970, the city’s police budget grew 900 percent and the CPD doubled the number of cops on the streets. Throughout this period, CPD really earns the title Balto gave the book: arrest quotas, “neighborhood saturation,” stop and frisk, and torture systematically terrorized— and through fines and fees, and collateral consequences (legal restrictions on accessing housing, public benefits, jobs, etc. for people with criminal records)—impoverished entire communities. Because policing in Chicago was fundamentally racist from the beginning, as Occupied Territory demonstrates, these huge investments in criminalization had devastating effects for Black and Brown Chicagoans. White arrest numbers dropped eighty-eight percent from the 1950s to the 2010s, while Black arrest rates skyrocketed—driving Black/white arrest disparities to rates of around sevento-one by 1998 in a city with roughly equal proportions of Black and white people. The Cook County criminal legal system was not the only feature of racial capitalism that exploited the city’s growing Black population—the real estate industry also made billions through redlining, contract buying, and other public-private partnerships. Further, throughout the “urban crises” of the 1960s and the economic and political crises of the 1970s, Balto details how policymakers at all levels
hollowed out essential government services while shoveling money towards death making institutions like police and prisons. He writes that, mirroring the federal government’s spending priorities, “the city threw increasing amounts of money at the police department while declining to invest in programs that would alleviate misery, reduce poverty, and enhance opportunity.” The most powerful resistance in this period came from groups like the Black Panthers, whose radical politics and mutual aid programs helped thousands in their communities even as they had to dedicate significant organizational resources to defending themselves from racist repression from the CPD and FBI. The chapters detailing the work of the Panthers throughout the turmoil of the 1960s, including the police riot at the 1968 Democratic convention and the murders of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in 1969, are Balto’s most prophetic. He details how “the Panthers didn’t have to tell community members to dislike or distrust the police, as if those sorts of sentiments were foreign to the West or South Sides… But what the Panthers did do was lift those grievances high into the public arena, infuse them with a more radical critique of capitalism and exploitation, and formulate specific strategies around them.” Two of the most important of those political strategies were campaigns calling for community control of the police, and for the city to redirect funds from the ballooning police budget JUNE 24, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5
